The weather frogs that did not groak in the night via:The Irish Trojan's blog - Brendan Loy's homepage

The weather frogs that can always be depended upon to turn a snowflake into a blizzard of biblical proportions were strangely quiet in the face of a FORCE FIVE hurricane. Brendan Loy has comments:

"NBC's Brian Williams admitted on The Daily Show tonight that when the National Weather Service predicted 24 hours before landfall that Katrina would produce catastrophic damage resulting in "human suffering incredible by modern standards," the folks at NBC were skeptical that the prediction was real, and weren't sure at first whether to air it. This echoes the sentiments of one commenter on this blog, who asked at the time, "Sure it is not a hoax?"

NBC's highly skeptical reaction just goes to show that the media -- like local, state and federal officials -- simply wasn't taking this storm seriously enough, considering how obviously grave the threat was. If NBC and the rest of the MSM had just listened to what their own reports had been saying for years about the threat to New Orleans from a storm just like Katrina, they would have found nothing at all unbelievable about the sort of alarmist statements that the NWS was making on that Sunday. Water shortages and human suffering were a key element of all the hypothetical scenarios that had been reported on so extensively. Yet journalists, even good ones, were predisposed not to believe their own hype, it seems; all science and logic to the contrary, I guess they just didn't think the worst was possible.

I told Tucker Carlson last night that "the real story here, frankly, isn't that I 'called' it. ... I don't think I said anything extraordinary. What I was saying was pretty obvious: 'this thing is coming toward New Orleans, if the forecast comes true,' and we've always known that a storm heading towards New Orleans would be an absolute disaster. And I frankly don't quite understand why more people weren't as alarmed as I was." Carlson sagely replied, "That's something America, collectively, doesn't understand." But as Williams's comments tonight make clear, Carlson's own network, NBC, was just as oblivious as the rest of the government and media to the full extent of Katrina's potential for utter devastation (a potential that, remember, was nowhere near fully realized in New Orleans, which was actually spared the brunt of the storm). All the facts were there for the pundits and politicians to draw the correct conclusion; they just couldn't bring themselves to believe it.